1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data receiving circuit, especially to a multi-phase clock generator and method thereof.
2. Description of the Prior Art
For a large system-on-a-chip (SOC), the manufacturing process is limited primarily by the manufacturing process of the silicon intellectual property (SIP) adopted by the SOC. If the manufacturing process of each SIP were more flexible, the difficulty and time in exploiting an SOC could be reduced. For a common high-speed serial link, data reception and transmission are frequently achieved in the following ways: full-rate reception and transmission, half-rate reception and transmission, or multi-phase over-sampling reception and transmission. The former two methods require a full or a half transmission rate for the operating clock of the chip. When the data transmission rate is as high as or higher than the giga-Hertz (G-bit/sec) level, low-cost manufacturing processes such as 0.25 μm and 0.35 μm processes become deficient and can hardly be utilized. As to the multi-phase over-sampling reception and transmission, plenty of sampling circuits adopting relatively low sampling rates are utilized to achieve high transmission rates. Therefore, the operating clock of the chip can be effectively reduced such that the limit on the manufacturing process can be lowered.